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Oregon schools' big switch to academics-only grades, with no penalty for late papers or missing homework, is kaput

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In 2009, student Nora Scheiner, then 12, attended a conference with her mom, Barbara, and math teacher, Chad Van Kleek, to discuss her grades in math. Her school put a big emphasis on proficiency that year.
(Bruce Ely / The Oregonian )

"We felt absolutely compelled
to clarify in statute what the original intent" of the 2011 law was: "to give
districts that wanted to move to proficiency grading and the tools to do so,"
Buckley said. "It was never intended to be a mandate."

His original bill was just a page and a half long and never
mentioned the word "behavior." It was
never intended to mandate how districts design their grading systems, he said,
but merely to offer options. It seemed so uncontroversial to lawmakers and
education-watchers that no one testified against it and just one of Oregon's 90
lawmakers voted against it.

But when it got to the Oregon
Department of Education, the agency's obligation was to make rules that matched
what the bill actually said, not what lawmakers may have intended, said
spokeswoman Crystal Greene.

The bill said, "Each district
shall adopt a grading system ... that shall ... be based on the student's progress
toward becoming proficient in a continuum of knowledge and skills."

Perhaps because a small
number of Oregon districts had recently embraced "proficiency-based education,"
department staffers and the wide range of educators they invited to help write
the rules read that as a mandate to grade solely on academic mastery. The bill
added fewer than 70 words to Oregon law, and three of them were "proficient" or
"proficiency."

Despite good intentions, the
way the rule-making played out was a mistake, education specialist Andrea
Morgan said this week. Huge shifts in grading practices and a switch to
proficiency-style teaching and grading work only when they are built and
embraced from the ground up, she says.

Buckley agrees.

It is extremely rare for Oregon lawmakers to put an emergency clause in an education policy bill and change an important school rule mid-school-year. But lawmakers voted to do so with grading this year.

Both Morgan and Buckley are big fans of the
proficiency approach to education, with its emphasis on teachers helping students
gain a well-chosen set of key skills on variable timelines rather than basing school credits and progress on seat
time.

But they say that will be
left up to schools, teachers, parents and principals to decide – not the
Legislature and not the state education department.

"It has all become optional
now," Morgan said. "It resets it back to where districts can make the
determination of what's best for their district."